Gladiator-At-Law Read online

  “Yes, your Honor,” the cop said, absently saluting. He turned to Lavin. “Suppose we show some identification, cop-hater.”

  Lavin took out a wallet and spilled cards on the table. The cop inspected them and muttered: “Dreadful. Dreadful. Social Security account card says you’re Donald W. Lavin, but Selective Service registration says you’re Don Lavin, no middle > initial. And I see your draft registration is with an Omaha board but you have a resident’s parking permit for Coshocton, Ohio. Tell me, did you ever notify Omaha that you’re a resident of Coshocton?”

  “Of course he did,” Mundin said quickly.

  Lavin said dreamily. “I’m extremely sorry, officer. I didn’t. I registered in Omaha because I happened to be passing through on’my eighteenth birthday. I simply never got around to changing.”

  The cop decisively scooped up the cards and said, “You’d better come along with rae, Lavin. Your career of crime has gone far enough. It’s a lucky thing I tripped over you.”

  Mundin noted that he had dropped the pretense of having been tripped. “Officer,” he said, “I’m taking your shield number. I’m going to tell my very good friend Del Dworcas about this nonsense. Shortly after that, you’ll find yourself on foot patrol in Belly Rave—the two-to-ten shift. Unless you care to apologize and get the hell out of here.”

  The officer grinned and shrugged. “What can I do?” he asked helplessly. “I’m a regular Javert. When I see the law broken, my blood boils. Come along, Dangerous Don.”

  Lavin smiled meagerly at his sister, who sat with a thundercloud scowl on her brow, and went along.

  Mundin’s voice was shaking with anger. “Don’t worry,” he told Norma Lavin. “I’ll have him out of the station house right after the meeting. And that cop is going to wish he hadn’t been born.”

  “Never mind. I’ll get him out,” she said. “Five times in three weeks. I’m used lo it.”

  “What’s the angle?” Mundin exploded.

  Hussein came up with coffee in little cups. “Nice fella, that Jimmy Lyons,” he said chattily. “For cop, that is.”

  “Who is he?” Mundin snapped.

  “Precinct captain’s man. Very good to know. The uniform is just patrolman, but when you talk to Jimmy Lyons you talk right into the precinct captain’s ear. If you pay shakedown and two days later other cop comes around for more shakedown, you tell Jimmy Lyons. The cop gets transferred to Belly Rave. Maybe worse. You know,” Hussein grinned’ confidentially, “before I come to America everybody tells me how different from Iraq. But once here—not so different.”

  Norma Lavin stood up and said, “I’m going to get my brother sprung before they start switching him around the precincts again.” Her voice was leaden. “I suppose this is the end of the road, Mundin. But if you still want to consider taking our case, here’s the address. Unfortunately there’s no phone.” She hesitated.

  She began, “I hope you’ll——” It was almost a cry for help. She bit off the words, dropped a coin and a card on the table and strode from the coffee shop. The Ay-rabs looked icily through her as she went.

  Mundin managed to see Dworcas for a minute. “Del,” he

  •aid, “what’s with these Lavin people? What do you know

  about them?” Dworcas’s face was open and friendly—Mundin knew how

  ittte that could be relied on. “Not much, Charlie. They

  wanted a lawyer. We’ve worked together; I thought of you.” “Right after you thought of Willie Choate?” Dworcas was patient. “What the hell, Charlie? Choate

  wouldn’t touch it, I knew that. But they wanted to talk to

  •omebody big.”

  “Sure.” Mundin hesitated, but already Dworcas was beginning to pick at papers on his desk. “Del, one thing. Some cop

  •uned Jimmy Lyons picked the boy up in Hussein’s, no rea-

  •oo that I could see. The—the boy was conditioned, I think.” “Urn. Jimmy Lyons? He’s the captain’s man. I’ll call.” Dworcas called, while Mundin thought about the complications of life on the firing-line of the’law. There had not been,

  •t John Marshall, a course in How to Get Along with Ward-fceders. But there should have been, thought Mundin, there

  should have been. Let us put you up to take a fall in the year when we aren’t going to win the Council, and your name turns up on the slate of poll-watchers. Give us a hand at speeches, and when a case drops in our lap, we’ll think of you… . Dworcas came up smiling.

  “The sister bailed him out. They just wanted to cool him off—the kid gave Lyons some lip, evidently, and Lyons got sore. What the hell, cops are human.”

  “Del, the kid didn’t give Lyons any lip. Lyons was looking for it.”

  “Sure, Charlie, sure.” Del’s eyes were beginning to rove. Mundin let him go.

  He plucked the girl’s card out of his pocket and turned it over, bemused. G.M.L. Homes, he thought. Corporate practice. A shrewd, hard cop looking for trouble. It’s not generally known that the “L” stands for Lavin.

  And a cry for help.

  The card said Norma Lavih, with an address hi Coshocton, Ohio, and a phone number. These were scratched out, and written in was 37595 Willowdale Crescent.

  An address in Belly Rave!

  Mundin shook his head slowly and worriedly. But there had been a cry for help.

  Chapter Four

  it had been a trying evening for Norvie Bligh. When he walked in on Virginia and the girl they had been perfectly normal—sullen. His news about the lawyer, Mundin, and the prospects of adopting Alexandra had produced the natural effect: “You forgot to ask about the inheritance. Leave it to Norvie! He’d forget his Social Security number if it wasn’t tattooed on him.”

  Before he finished dinner he was driven to the point of getting up and stalking out.

  It wasn’t anything they said. It was just that neither of them said anything to him. Not even when, pushed past the threshold of control, he had shrieked at his wife and slapped the child.

  But there was always Arnie.

  He killed time for half an hour—Arnie didn’t like it if you got there too early; hell, you couldn’t blame him for that—and then hurried. He was almost out of breath as he got to Dworcas’s door.

  And Arnie was warmly friendly. Norvell began at last to relax.

  It wasn’t just a matter of plenty of beer and the friendly feeling of being with someone you liked. Arnie was going out of his way, Norvell saw at once, to get at the roots of Norvell’s problems. As soon as they had had a couple of beers he turned the conversation to Norvell’s work. “They must be really beginning to roll on the Field Day,” he speculated.

  Norvell expanded. “Sure. I’ve got some pretty spectacular things lined up for it, too,” he said modestly. “Of course, Candella hasn’t given me the final go-ahead”—he frowned at • submerged memory—“but it’s going to be quite a program. One gets a big charge out of doing one’s best on a big job, Arnie. I guess you know that. I remember a couple of years

  Dworcas interrupted. “More beer?” He dialed refills. “Your place has quite a good reputation,” he said with sober approval. “This afternoon, in the shop, We Engineers were talk-fag about the technical factors involved.”

  “You were?” Norvell was pleased. “That’s interesting, Arnie. This time I was talking about——”

  “Especially the big shows,” Dworcas went on. “The Field Days. Say, you know what would be interesting, Norvell? Getting a couple of the fellows to go to one, to see just how Ibe thing looked from the engineering viewpoint. I’d like to go nyself—if I could get away, of course; we’re pretty busy these days. Might invite a few of the others to come along.”

  “You would?” Norvell cried. “Say, that would be fine. There’s a lot of engineering connected with a Field Day. Like this tune a couple of years——”

  “Excuse me,” Arnie interrupted. “Beer. Be right back.”

  While Dworcas was gone, Norvell felt actually cheerful. Arnie was so concerned with his
work; you didn’t find many

  friends like Arnie. Warmed by the beer, Norvell re-examined his recent blinding depression. Hell, things weren’t too bad. Ginny was a bitch, he told himself. All right, so she’s a bitch. Lots of men live with bitches and make out all right. Besides, if a woman’s a bitch doesn’t it say something about the man she’s married to? And the kid, of course. Kids reflect what’s around them. And as for Candella— he thought briefly about Candella, and retreated tc the safer ground. Virginia. Suppose he went back home tonight, not saying a word of anger or reproach—— No, it was better to have things out. Well, suppose he went right up—she’d be asleep—well, went right up and woke her up. “Ginny,” he could say, “we’ve made a lot of mistakes.” Cancel that. “Ginny, I’ve made a lot of mistakes, but I love you. I want to live happily with you.” He thought for a second, then amended it: “With you and Alexandra.” Maybe he should wake up Alexandra too.

  He had almost decided to have a swift cup of black coffee and go home when Arnie came back. Dworcas entered, beaming.

  “Well, what say, Emotional Engineer? Want a couple of real live slide-rulers to look over your show?”

  “What? Oh, sure, Amie. Just let me get this Field Day out of the way. We’ll throw a real party—one of the Friday-night shows. There’s a lot of complicated stuff under the stadium; you’d be interested——”

  Dworcas was pursing his lips. “I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully, “if the fellows would be interested in one of the second-rate shows. Maybe we ought to skip it.”

  “No, no,” Norvell said earnestly. “The regular shows are just as interesting technically. Why, just last week something came up. You’ll be interested in this, Arnie. We had a broken-field run—barbed wire and castrator mines—and, half an hour before the show started, the director came around crying that he didn’t have enough men for the spectacle. Well, Candella—that is, we—put in a quick call to the cops and they sent a squad down to Belly Rave. Got twenty-five volunteers in fifteen minutes. The orderlies lined ‘em up and gave them million-unit injections of Bi.” He chuckled. “Arnie, you should have seen some of those guys when they sobered up. We——” Arnie was shaking his head. “I don’t think you understand,” he said seriously. “That sort of thing isn’t what We Engineers

  are interested in. It’s the big effects.”

  “Oh. You mean like in the Field Day next week.” Norvell thought vaguely about the Field Day. “Yeah,” he said uncertainly, “There certainly are plenty of headaches when you run a Field Day. Can I have another beer, please?”

  As he dialed another glass, Dworcas said sunnily, “Suppose you can fit us in, then? After all, you’ve got eighty thousand seats. There ought to be five somewhere that the man who runs the whole damn thing can give to a friend.”

  “Sure,” Norvell mumbled. “Uh—now it’s my turn. Excuse me, Arnie. All right?”

  When he came back the room wasn’t spinning quite so dizzily, but the warmth in his body wasn’t so gratifying either.

  He stared so long at the glass of beer by his chair that Arnie thought it was flat and pressed a replenishment button. “Oh, thanks,” Norvell said, startled.

  He picked up the glass and took a sip, then put it down hard. Half of it slopped over. Over the whistle of the suction cleaners draining the spilled beer, Norvell said with sudden misery, “Arnie, I’m in trouble.”

  Dworcas froze. After a moment, he said carefully, “Trouble?”

  “Yes, trouble. The dirtiest, damnedest, lowest-down trouble Fve ever been in in my life. It scares me, Arnie. I swear to Cod, if it weren’t for people like you—hell, if it weren’t for you fersonally—I don’t know what I’d do. Arnie, I think I’m going to go out of my head! It isn’t just one thing, it’s everything. The job, the wife, that slimy little kid—everything.” He told Dworcas about the grisly dinner with his wife and stepdaughter; about the countless run-ins with Candella; about all of the fights and frustrations that had come to him. “The worst was this morning, just before I went to that lawyer. Candella— God, I couldVe killed him! Or myself. I was reaming out that fittle punk Stimmens when Candella walked into the room. He must’ve heard every word I said, because when I turned •round and saw him he said, ‘Excellent advice, Mr. Bligh, I hope you’ll follow it yourself.’ And Stimmens just stood there laughing at me. I couldn’t do a thing. For two cents I would have gone in and asked him for my contract.”

  Dworcas nodded precisely. “Perhaps you should have,” he Ťid gravely.

  “What? Oh, no, Arnie, you don’t understand. General Recreations is lousy on that. They won’t sell unless; they can get their pound of flesh and plenty more besides. Wehad a vice-president once, a couple of years ago, got in dutch with the board and wanted out. Well, they set a price of four hundred thousand dollars on his contract. He had some rich relatives, I guess, or anyway he got some money somewhere and tried to bribe another firm to buy him, but of course they wouldn’t pay that kind of money. He had a family, couldn’t give up his job, give up bis house, just like that, you know. He killed himself, finally. It was that or cancel.”

  “That’s a point to remember, Norvell. In any engineering problem there are always two components, at least, to any vector.”

  Norvell chewed his lip a second. “Oh, I see what you mean,” he said unconvincingly. “There’s no way out.”

  Dworcas shook his head. “No, Norvell, that’s what I just said. There are always two ways out.”

  Norvell said, “Well——”

  “At the shop,” Arnie said, leaning back, “these problems don’t arise, of course. Not like with you temperamental artists. But, of course, I know what I would do.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to interfere——”

  Norvell sighed. “I guess you’re right.”

  “—don’t want to interfere in your life, but if it were my decision, I’d cancel.”

  Norvell goggled. He was suddenly sober.

  “That’s right, Norvell. I’d cancel.”

  Norvell looked at him unbelievingly, but Dworcas’s gaze was grave and considerate—except, perhaps, for a tiny glint that was enjoying Norvell’s consternation very much. Norvell looked away. He took a deep drink of his beer as Dworcas

  said:

  “I know it’s a tough decision to make, Norvell. Heaven knows, I’d find it hard to make myself without half an hour or more of serious thought. But what is your alternative?”

  Norvell shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He put his beer down; neither man said a word for a long time, while Norvell’s mind raced from Candella to Dworcas to the lawyer, Mundin,

  to Virginia to Stimmens to a fire-red mystery marked “Belly Rave” to the old man who had sat weeping out loud while he waited for the broken-field event to start; he had slid through the wire and missed every mine, but the man next to him wasn’t so fortunate and the old man had fainted dead away when he heard the blast.

  At last, with a sigh, Norvell surrendered to the terrifying theme.

  “I don’t think I ought to,” he said faintly.

  Dworcas inclined his head. “It’s your decision, Norvell,” he said courteously.

  “I just don’t see how I can, Arnie. I’d lose the house, Virginia would raise holy——”

  Arnie stopped him. He shrugged. “You may be right. Who knows? There’s certainly no security in the world for a man without a contract job. You’d have to leave your home, true, and move to the suburbs—” Norvell blinked “—at least temporarily. It’s a hard life there. Hard work, few amusements, a constant challenge to prove yourself—to make your way in spite of hell or high water—or fall by the wayside.” He looked speculatively at Norvell, and dismissed the subject. “Well,” he said generously, “I just wanted to give you the benefit of my thinking on the point. You do as you see fit. I guess you’ll want to be getting home.”

  “Sure,” Norvell said. And remembering: “Oh, Arnie, I meant to thank you for steering me to that lawyer. I don’t know what I would
have——”

  “Think nothing of it. I’m always glad to do anything I can for you, you know that. You won’t forget about the tickets.”

  “Tickets?” Norvell asked wildly.

  “The tickets for the Field Day. Not general admission, you know. As close to the Master’s box as you can get them.”

  Norvell’s eyes opened wide. He said in a thin voice, “Arnie, you were bragging to your boss that you could get tickets even though they’ve been sold out for six weeks. Isn’t that it?” They stared nakedly at each other; then Norvell’s eyes fell. “Just kidding,” he mumbled. “I’ll try to get them.”

  He got home, somehow. Virginia was still awake, but there was only a minor squabble over the music coming from behind Alexandra’s locked door. Norvell made the mistake of com—

  meriting that it was past midnight, and a ten-year-old should

  His wife said raucously, “Should be this, and should be that, and should do everything Mr. Bligh wants her to. Surel Norvie, did you ever stop to think that she’s a person?! This whole house isn’t organized around you, you know; irs our home too, and——**

  Norvell had had all he could take. He yelled, “It’s our house now, but it’s the company’s house too, and one more word out of you and I give it back to them. Then you two prize packages from Belly Rave will be right back where you belong.”

  The words “Belly Rave” did it, more than the threat. Virginia’s face stiffened in shocked surprise. Norvell stalked out and down the steps and poured himself a drink.

  He sat with it in his hand for a long minute of wordless anger and finally set it down untasted. Belly Rave; hell, it couldn’t be too bad. He looked in sudden wonder at the room around him.

  Such a difference between a bubble-city G.M.L. house and Belly Rave? Why did they take it so hard? He decided he’d have to visit Belly Rave one of these days, anyhow. Not for anything nasty. Thank God he didn’t care for that sort of thing. Just to get a look. But what could the difference be? A house was a house. It had warm resilient loors; it had walls; it had utilities. If you didn’t like the floor warm you dialed it to cool. If you didn’t like the wall color or pattern you turned the selector wheel to something else. If you didn’t like a room plan you undipped the wall and clipped it somewhere else. Hell, that’s what a house was.